【英文文学】Peter.doc

《【英文文学】Peter.doc》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《【英文文学】Peter.doc（185页珍藏版）》请在得力文库 - 分享文档赚钱的网站上搜索。

1、【英文文学】PeterCHAPTER IThe two who mattered were lounging on the cushioned seat in the low window, of which the lower panes had been pushed quite up in order to admit the utmost possible influx of air. Little came in, for the afternoon was sultry and windless, but every now and then some current moved

2、outside, some trickle of comparative coolness from the grass and trees of the Green Park, sufficient to stir the girls hair. On this high floor of the house of flats London seemed far remote; the isolation as of an aeroplane, as of a ship at sea, protected them from external intrusion.Inside the roo

3、m a party of four were assembled round the tea-table; the hostess, mother of the girl who sat in the window-seat, was wondering, without impatience, as was becoming to so chinned and contented a face, when Mrs. Alston would cease gesticulating with her sandwich and eat it, instead of using it as a c

4、onductors baton to emphasize her points in the discourse to which nobody was listening. The sandwich had already a large semicircular bite out of it, which penetrated well past its centre, and one more application (if she would only make it) to that capacious mouth would render it reasonable to supp

5、ose that she had finished her tea. Mrs. Heaton herself2 had done so; so also had the stout grey-haired man with the varnished face, and as for Mrs. Underwood, she had long ago drunk her cup of hot water and refused any further nourishment. But while Mrs. Alston brandished her crescent of a sandwich,

6、 and continued talking as if somebody had contradicted her, it was impossible to suggest a move to the bridge-table that stood ready with new packs and sharpened pencils a couple of yards away. To the boy and girl in the window that quartette of persons seemed of supreme unimportance both by reason

7、of their age and of the earnest futility of their conversation. They talked eagerly about dull things like politics and prices instead of being flippant, in the modern style, about interesting things. Between them and the younger generation there was the great gulf digged by the unrelenting years, a

8、nd set on fire by the war. It was not flaring and exploding any longer, but lay there in smouldering impassable clinkers.“High prices and high wages!” asserted Mrs. Alston. “Thats what is going to be the ruin of the country. Ive said over and over again, Why not have an Act of Parliament to halve th

9、e price of food and coal and that sort of thing, and another Act, unless you could get it into the same one, to reduce wages by a half also? High prices, so everybody allows, are the cause of high wages, and if miners and that sort of person could buy their food and their clothes at half the price t

10、hey pay for them now, there would not be the slightest difficulty in reducing wages by a half, instead of multiplying them by two every time that they threaten to strike. Coal! The root of all the trouble is the price of coal. Reduce the price of coal by half, and instantly the price of transport an

11、d gas and electricity will go down in a corre3sponding manner. Steel, too, and linen; it all depends on coal. The English sovereign has to-day hardly more than half the buying power it used to have. Hardly more than half! Restore it, then, by reducing the price of everything else, including wages. I

12、ncluding wages, mind! Otherwise you will find yourselves in a fine mess!”She put the rest of her sandwich into her mouth, precisely as Mrs. Heaton had hoped and even foreseen. That made her mouth quite full, and for the moment she was as dumb as the adder. Her hostess, alert for this psychological o

13、ccasion, gave a short, judicial and fulsome summing-up, addressed to the court in general.“Well, dearest Mary,” she said. “You have made me understand it all now, a thing which I never did before. So well put, was it not, Mr. Steel, and Im sure quite unanswerable. We must none of us attempt to argue

14、 with dearest Mary, because she would show us at once how stupid it was of us, and I, for one, hate to be made a fool of. What a good explanation! Quite brilliant! So now shall we get to our bridge? I expect were all going to the opera to-night, and so we shall all want to dress early. Dear me, its

15、after half-past five already! Will nobody have any more tea? Quite sure? Shall we cut, then? Oh, there are Nellie and Peter in the window. Wouldnt you like to cut in, too, dear?”“No, mother, we shouldnt!” said Nellie.The four others swooped to the bridge-table, with the swift sure flight of homing p

16、igeons, and hastily cut their cards in order to give no time for repentance on the part of the two others.“You and I, Mr. Steel,” said Mrs. Heaton hastily. “Quite sure you wouldnt like to play, Peter?4”“Quite,” said Peter gently. “I should hate it; thanks awfully.”“Well, if youre quite sure you wont

17、my deal I think, partner. Shall it be pennies?”Mr. Steel had a whimsical idea.“Oughtnt we to halve our points, too, Mary?” he said. “Like wages and coal?”For a moment he was sorry he had been so rashly humorous, for Mrs. Alston opened her mouth and drew in her breath as if to speak on a public platf

18、orm to the largest imaginable audience. Then, luckily, she found something so remarkable in her hand that her fury for political elucidation was quenched, and she devoted the muscles of her athletic mind to considering what she would do if the dealer was so rash as to call no trumps. Thereafter the

19、great deeps, dimly peopled with enemies ready to pounce out of the subaqueous shadows and double you, completely submerged the four of them. They lit cigarettes as in a dream, and smoked them in alternate hells and heavens.Nellie looked at them once or twice, as an an?sthetist might look at his pati

20、ent to see whether he was quite unconscious. The third glance was convincing.“It must be rather sweet to be middle-aged, Peter,” she said. “For the next two hours theyll think about nothing but aces and trumps!”“Sign of youth,” said Peter.“Why?”“Because theyre absorbed, like children. When you were

21、little, you could only think about one thing at a time. It might be dentist or it might be hoops. But you and I cant think about anything for more than five minutes together, or care about anything5 for more than two. I suppose that when youre old you recapture that sort of youthfulness.”He paused a

22、 moment.“Go on: tell me about it all,” he said.Nellie did not reply at once, but began plaiting her fingers together with the little finger on the top. They were slender and small like her face, which narrowed very rapidly from the ears downwards to a pointed chin. Loose yellow hair, the colour of h

23、oney, grew low over her forehead, and just below it, her eyebrows, noticeably darker than her hair, made high arches, giving her face an expression of irony and surprise. Her forehead ran straight into the line of her nose, and a short upper lip held her mouth in imperfect control, for it hinted and

24、 wondered, and was amused and contemptuous as its mood took it. Now it half-smiled; now it was half serious, but always it only hinted.Peter apparently grew impatient of her silence and her finger plaiting.“Youre making them look like bananas on a street-barrow,” he observed.Nellie smoothed them out

25、 and gave an appreciative sigh.“Oh, I bought two to-day,” she said, “and ate them in the street. I had to throw the skins away, and then I was afraid that somebody would slip on them and break his leg.”“So you picked them up again,” suggested Peter.“No, I didnt. I was only sorry for anybody who migh

26、t slip on them. I couldnt tell who it was going to be, and probably I shouldnt know him”“Get on,” he said.“Oh, about Philip. Well, there it was. He asked me, you see, andof course, hes rather old,6 but hes tremendously attractive. And its so safe and pleasant, and I like being adored. After all, you

27、 and I have talked it over often enough, and you knew just as well as I did that I was going to accept him if he wanted me.”Nellie suddenly felt that she was justifying what she had done, and she did not mean to do that. What she had done justified itself by its own inherent good sense. She changed

28、her tone, and began counting on those slim fingers which just now had introduced the extraneous subject of bananas.“Peter, darling,” she said. “If his grandfather and an uncle and two children of the uncle die, there is no doubt whatever that I shall be a peeress. Wont that be fun? I feel that Uncle

29、 Robert and the two children may easily die; theyre the sort of people who do die, but I doubt whether grandpapa ever will. Hes like the man with the white beard; do I mean the Ancient Mariner or the Ancient of Days, who comes in Ezekiel?”Peter Mainwaring rocked backwards in the window-seat with a s

30、udden little explosion of laughter that made all the bridge players look up as if their heads were tied to the same tweaked string. Then they submerged again.“Not Ezekiel, anyhow,” he said. “Its either Daniel or Coleridge. I expect Coleridge.”“Yes, I mean Coleridge,” she said. “The man who stops the

31、 wedding guest; wedding guest was what suggested it. Grandpapa always wanted Philip to marry one of those cousins of his, who look like tables with drawers in them. Long legs and bumps on their faces like the handles of the drawers. But Philip wouldnt.”Peter ran his fingers along the line of his jaw

32、 as if7 to be sure that he had shaved that morning. His face for a man of twenty-two was ridiculously smooth and hairless; it did not much matter whether he had shaved or not.“Naturally Philip wouldnt,” he said, “but thats got nothing to do with it. I dont want to know why Philip didnt do something,

33、 but why you did. I want to see your point, to do you justice. At present I feel upset about it. You know quite well that theres only one person you ought to marry.”“You?” asked Nellie, feeling that the question was quite unnecessary.“How clever of you to guess. You are clever sometimes. Oh, I know

34、weve talked it over enough and seen how impossible it was, but when it comes to your marrying someone else”He lit a match and blew it out again.“I know,” he said. “Youve got threepence a year, and Ive got twopence, so that in the good old times we should have been able to buy one pound of sugar ever

35、y Christmas. Even then we should have had nothing to eat with it. But what you havent sufficiently reckoned with is the fact that by the time I am a hundred and fifty years old, I shall get a pension of a hundred and fifty pounds from the Foreign Office. But its rather a long time to wait.”Nellies e

36、yes suddenly grew fixed and rapt.“Oh, Peter, one moment!” she whispered. “Look quickly at mammas face. When that holy expression comes on it, it always means that she is intending to declare no trumps. So when Im playing against her, if its my turn first I always declare one no trumps, and then she

37、has to declare two. Wait one second, Peter.8”“No trumps,” said Mrs. Heaton.“There, I told you so!” said Nellie. “Yes; it is rather long to wait, though I dont mean to say that a hundred and fifty isnt a very pleasant age, dear. The people in Genesis usually lived five hundred years before they marri

38、ed, and begat sons and daughters. Anyhow, I shall be a widow before youre a hundred and fifty, and then we shall be engaged for three hundred and fifty years more, and then we shall totter to the altar. I cant help talking drivel; its all too serious to take seriously. By the way, I shall be richer

39、than you eventually, for when mamma dies I shall have two thousand a year, but that wont be for two thousand years. We have been born too soon, Peter!”Peter thought this not worth answering, but lifting one of his knees, nursed it between his clasped hands in silence. For her loose honey-coloured ha

40、ir, he had a crisp coal-blackness; he was tall for her small slim stature, and his lips were set to definite purposes, whereas hers were malleable to adapt themselves to any emotion that might waywardly blow on her. But both, in compensation for differences that were complementary, were triumphantly

41、 alike in the complete soullessness of their magnificent youth; without violation of any internal principle they might, either of them, shoot up singing with the lark, or pad and prowl with the ruthless hunger of the tiger, or burrow with the mole. They were Satyr and Hamadryad, some ancient and ete

42、rnally young embodiment of life, with whim to take the place of conscience, and the irresponsible desire of wild things to do duty for duty, and impulse to take the place of reason. Each, too, had developed to an almost alarming degree that modern passion for introspection, which9 is an end in itsel

43、f, and like a barren tree, yields no fruit in the ways of action or renunciation.Peter hugged his knee, and his eye grew hazy and unfocused in meditation.“Am I in love with you, do you think?” he asked at length.She laughed, quite disregarding the ears of the bridge players. With Peter she was more

44、herself than with anyone else, or even than when alone.“Oh, thats so like you,” she said, “and so wonderfully like me. Certainly youre not in love with me; youre not in love with anybody. You never have been; you never will be. Youre fonder of me than of anybody else, but thats a very different thin

45、g.”“But how do you know Im not in love with you?” he asked. “I may be. Youre not so unattractive. Why shouldnt I be in love with you?”“Its obvious you arent. To begin with, you dont feel the smallest jealousy of Philip. Besides, though you so kindly say that Im not so unattractive, youre the one per

46、son who really sees and notes and mentions my imperfections. You wouldnt be so critical of me if you were in love. And then, as I said, youre not jealous of Philip.”“Good Lord, how could I be jealous of Philip?” asked he. “I should have to want to be Philip before I could be jealous of him, and I wo

47、uldnt be Philip, even as things stand, for anything in the world. Besides, you dont really think him so tremendously attractive though you said so just now. You said that out of pure conventionality, not out of conviction.”Some momentary perplexity, like a cloud on a sunny windy day of spring bowled

48、 its shadow over10 her face, and creased a soft perpendicular furrow between her eyebrows.“Peter, I think I want to become conventional,” she said, “and, if you wish, I will confess I was practising for it when I said that. Oh, my dear, were all human, cast in a mould and put in a cage, if you dont mind mixed metaphors. Im going to marry in the ordinary way, just because girls do marry. Mamma married, so did my two grandmammas, and four great-grandmammas, and eight great-great-grandmammas. In fact the further you go back, the commoner marriage seems to have been. Some awful